by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 26: SHOCKtober 2022

The movies that letterboxd/justwatch say are available on Prime doesn’t perfectly line up with the movies actually on Prime. On the hunt for horrors I’m kinda tempted to watch even though I know in my heart they’re not worth the 100 minutes, and Prime is mostly full of movies I’m not-at-all tempted to watch… but here’s some.

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A Quiet Place 2 (2020, John Krasinski)

Kids hide indoors while the parents and their cars are not being quiet at all, the movie (unfortunately) giving us very clear looks at its digital aliens. Hey, it’s Djimon Hounsou, oh no, he’s dead now. Then everyone creeps around being vewy vewy quiet, avoiding the preposterously long-armed monsters, Cillian and Emily running into trouble in separate spots simultaneously, until the kids discover the assaultive power of mic feedback on creatures with sensitive hearing. Movie actually looks suspenseful, an unfunny Mars Attacks.

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Paranormal Activity 5: The Marked Ones (2014, Christopher Landon)

We left off with part 2, and this is part 5 – but I don’t think they share characters, and Amazon doesn’t have parts 3 or 4 for free. Handheld long take of gun-toting youth walking around the backyard until suddenly attacked by white ladies, cameraman running to hide in a witch house. The last surviving punk ends up in a cursed closet, and I think teleports into a different Paranormal Activity movie, I dunno, it’s all very panicked. Landon went on to the Happy Death Day movies and a Vince Vaughn serial killer Freaky Friday.

Nocturne (2020, Zu Quirke)

Sydney is gonna play piano onstage, but she’s having dark visions and her sister Madison is being shitty to her. She flees the concert, running towards a yellow light and stepping off the roof, having deathdreams of the great performance she would’ve given. Sydney was a Manson girl for Tarantino, the sister is in the recent Jumanji series. Frank Capra III worked on this, tarnishing the legacy of his grandfather’s most famous movie which is about NOT stepping off the roof.

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Daniel Isn’t Real (2019, Adam Egypt Mortimer)

Hey, it’s Sasha Lane. More artsy high schoolers. Daniel is real, and is wearing a Luke mask, while Luke is locked in a museum dungeon of the mind, fighting and conjuring his way out. Always the teens end up jumping off roofs. Mortimer did a horror anthology I’d never heard of and a vengeful ghost story named after a Misfits song, while Luke was in the latest(?) remake of Halloween, and Daniel has a famous dad.

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The Deep House (2021, Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury)

This one had a good poster and premise, but when I can make out the dialogue it’s all “the house, she knows your fears” stuff spoken by a diver who is clearly possessed by demons. Nice trick projecting super 8 film (underwater) of backstory. Tina’s boyfriend gets knifed by ghosts, she doesn’t make it to the surface, and the filmmakers haven’t worked out how to make any of this look compelling. Bilge liked it. I disliked the directors’ Inside (despite Béatrice Dalle), and I’m afraid they’ve also made a Texas Chainsaw prequel.

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Wolf Creek 2 (2013, Greg McLean)

Remember Wolf Creek? I don’t especially, but looks like the villain was alive at the end, returning 8 years later, and he ain’t gay, don’t call him gay. Tough guy Paul, also not gay, fights back with a hammer then wheels through a cellar full of torture victims while Mick bellows behind him, and it’s wrapped up anticlimactically via intertitles. Australia looks unpleasant.

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Hatchet III (2013, B.J. McDonnell)

I liked part 1, not part 2, so let’s see. Sheriff Zach Galligan loses his head, nice. Victor just tears every character apart, then the girl in white smashes the urn with his daddy’s ashes, and Victor melts. Seems like a good time, maybe I was in a mood when watching the previous sequel. I assume the girl in white was Halloween movie regular (and Tarantino Manson girl) Danielle Harris. The director made that Foo Fighters movie, oh no.

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Goodnight Mommy (2022, Matt Sobel)

Remake of movie I didn’t love, with horror remake queen Naomi Watts. The insane boy is sad because something is wrong with his brother Lucas, mom explains that Lucas died, and he burns down the barn with her inside it. Looks like a real drag. The director worked on that Brand New Cherry Flavor series my dad kept talking about, and I haven’t caught up with the original Austrian filmmakers’ follow-up The Lodge.

by ·Comments Off on Eight for Silver (2021, Sean Ellis)

Captain Howard Moon dies in hospital speaking the movie’s title (before it got changed to the generic The Cursed for streaming) after having a silver bullet yanked out of him in aftermath of WWI trench warfare.

Thirty-five years earlier, young Howard’s family and neighbors slaughtered all the gypsies, who had forged a set of silver teeth. The children, living in their fancy house with a mass grave in the yard, are having bad dreams, so they find the teeth and go all supernaturally murdery on each other and become tentacle werewolves, Howard surviving only to get killed in the war.

Crappy jump scares, and unforgivably long since it keeps repeating itself. I didn’t care about Anthropoid and this didn’t get great notices – can’t recall why I prioritized it, besides a masochistic urge to watch British movies during SHOCKtober.

by ·Comments Off on Asylum (1972, Roy Ward Baker)

Dr. Robert Powell (Ken Russell’s Mahler) arrives at the titular asylum to work for Dr. Starr, but is met by his assistant Patrick Magee instead. Magee says Starr is now a patient, locked safely upstairs with a trusty electrical system controlled by this button (I’ve heard that one before), and challenges Mahler to correctly identify the doctor. Mahler heroically pads the film on the way upstairs, and the orderly (who I correctly/immediately guessed as the doctor) lets him into each room, one at a time… yes, it’s a corny anthology horror, the same year Magee and Cushing and Dr. Orderly appeared in Tales from the Crypt. 1972 would seem to be too late for this kinda thing, but British people such as Edgar Wright think all this is great.

Bonnie (Barbara Parkins of The Mephisto Waltz and A Taste of Evil) isn’t even the murderer in her story – her boyfriend Richard Todd (the least famous person in House of the Long Shadows) chops up his harpy wife (Sylvia Syms, appropriately of Victim) and puts her in the basement freezer, but her butcher-paper-wrapped body parts reanimate, strangling him and attacking the unwitting Bonnie with the hatchet until the police arrive to blame the whole mess on her.

Tailor Bruno (Barry Morse of The Changeling) was brought the Man in the White Suit material by mysterious customer Peter Cushing, who planned on using dark magick to resurrect his dead son with the suit, but the tailor’s wife puts the suit on a mannequin which comes to life instead.

Barbara (young Charlotte Rampling, whoa) seems the most culpable so far. She starts by blaming Lucy (Britt Ekland of Wicker Man) for murdering her brother (James Villiers of Mountains of the Moon) and the nurse (Megs Jenkins of The Innocents), but Lucy might be an invented personality of Barbara’s.

Dr. Byron (Herbert Lom of The Sect) is at least a doctor of something – I don’t know how we’re supposed to imagine that the previous three were actually psychologists based on their stories. But Lom’s specialty is transmitting his consciousness into sub-Puppet Master wind-up dolls. The new visitor must’ve inspired a rampage, since he and Dr. Orderly go on the attack.

by ·Comments Off on The Blood Spattered Bride (1972, Vicente Aranda)

Sexually explicit horror movie filmed in Galicia. The Bride imagines being raped by a closet dweller at her honeymoon hotel, so instead they go to his weirdo family’s place, where instead she fantasizes of joining with Creepy Carmilla and murdering the husband with a dagger that looks like a bathtub faucet handle. She keeps having visions, so I assumed the time he finds Carmilla naked, buried in the sand and breathing through a scuba mask would be one of those, but nope.

Carmilla appears to be the ageless vampire of a family ancestor. By the end, she’s killed a couple locals, and turned the bride and young Carol, who sounds dubbed by someone older. The husband figures it out and does some vampire slaying, but this looks bad to the local authorities.

Who could kill a child?

This guy could:

Main dude was in The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (whoa) and Beyond Re-Animator. The Bride was a lead in The House That Screamed by Serrador, whose other movie I just watched, and Carmilla costarred with John Hurt and Peter Cushing in The Ghoul.

First I’ve seen by Aranda – his 1960’s proto-giallo Fata Morgana sounds good, and his murder mystery Exquisite Cadaver. The DP worked on Cannibal Apocalypse and Comin’ at Ya and the editor works with Carlos Saura. One of many adaptations of the Irish novel Carmilla – others include the previous year’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Alucarda, the British Vampire Lovers, a Christopher Lee called Crypt of the Vampire, Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses, and a three season youtube series.

by ·Comments Off on Prince of Darkness (1987, John Carpenter)

Rewatching some barely-remembered Carpenter movies this month, and this one turned out much better than The Fog. Science vs. Satan as priest Donald Pleasence unlocks an ancient chamber with a swirling green portal inside, and calls in a team of professors (who bring along their grad students) to attempt to halt the apocalypse. We know that’s at stake since they all have the same night visions (“you are receiving this broadcast as a dream”). As the church starts to attract worms, insects, and dirty weirdo humans seemingly led by Alice Cooper, the teams inside get to work analyzing and translating.

When the ancient texts of mysterious origin say that Jesus was a humanoid alien, evil is a real physical substance, and the son of satan is locked in the chamber, lifelong priest Pleasence is quick to discount all Christianity and believe this new thing. The green chamber shoots foul liquid at Meg-Ryanish Susan, who becomes evil and starts to kill people or drive them outside using plagues of beetles. Translator Lisa also gets juiced, oh no, then Kelly with a cross-shaped bruise absorbs the remaining liquid and becomes very evil indeed, looking for a mirror through which she can pull Satan into the world. Pleasence and student Catherine team up to stop this, but Cath falls through the mirror, in one of Carpenter’s most astounding scenes. Apocalypse not averted, now the dream transmissions show a possessed Cath standing menacingly in the “Saint Godard” church doorway.

Great music, of course. Our university group includes Victor Wong and Dennis Dun, both of Big Trouble in Little China. Doomed redhead Cath is Lisa Blount of Dead & Buried and Radioactive Dreams, her sad mustache boyfriend is Jameson Parker of White Dog. The first girl to get juiced is Anne Marie Howard of identical twin thriller Twinsanity, the girl who becomes very evil is Susan Blanchard of Russkies, and the Black Guy Who Does Not Die First is Jessie Lawrence Ferguson of Darkman.

by ·Comments Off on Hellraiser (2022, David Bruckner)

The latest reboot is a Hulu Original from Serbia – not promising, but we only get one Hellraiser movie every five or six years now, so better give it a shot. Does a good job following current trends: it’s too long (the longest Hellraiser by far), the dialogue gets buried under bassy music/fx, it’s got trans representation, gay characters quoting Lord Byron, and young people with trauma.

New box, new rules – box has six configurations, solver has to make six sacrifices then can choose from six rewards. Playboy art dealer (not that one) has box in prologue, prays to Leviathan and disappears. Years later, drug addict’s new bf, secretly working for art dealer, leads her to box. Conveniently for the box’s rule of sixes, we’ve got nearly that many characters: addict, her bf, her brother, his bf, their weirdly loyal roommate. Brother goes first, the movie showing us glimpses of demons and shifting walls then vanishing the kids offscreen, then we get a freebie sacrifice by visiting the art dealer’s box-supplier in hospital, then goes the roommate, then another freebie as she stabs a cenobite (!). Perhaps I lost count, but the traitor goes to hell, the man hiding in the walls ascends and is flayed into a rad cenobite, and the addict chooses life and walks away.

From the director of Night House and writers of Super Dark Times. Lead girl is from one-take horror Let’s Scare Julie, the brother is from a couple TV movies where he plays guys who are too powerfully handsome, his bf from a Scooby Doo spinoff prequel, her bf an American Animal, the art dealer from Elektra, the roommate is Ciaran Hinds’ daughter, original box-deliverer was in the latest Blade Runner, and head hell-priest cenobite from Neon Demon.

Charles Bramesco on twitter:

There’s no belief in pleasure here, Barker’s conflicted psychosexual overtones replaced by the deadening, simply opposed evils of drugs. Instead of a perverse negotiation of desires, everything is motivated by the logistics of getting poked by a box. And for the love of god (a malevolent giant rhombus, as we all know), will someone turn on a fucking light and let me get a good look at the clearly labored-over cenobite designs.

mdfmdf:

This needed to be way hornier. Hellraiser movies work better when they’re about getting a bit carried away with your kink than when they’re about some monkey’s paw thing, or owning the cenobites with facts and logic.

by ·Comments Off on Slumber Party Massacre (1982, Amy Holden Jones)

“Mass Murderer Escapes” headlines in the local paper, yessssss. Girls start getting nude and/or massacred when the credits are barely over.

New girl in school Valerie is reluctantly invited to Trish’s slumber party, says no and stays home with little sister Courtney, right next door, all “we don’t need friends to have fun.” The maniac is revealed early, drilling all the girls he can. It’s not worth keeping track of all Trish’s murdered friends, but Trish was in a couple of Charles Bronson movies, Valerie in the classic Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, and the killer in an Amazing Stories episode from the director of Kazaam.

Some boys attempt to come over, a neighbor is hunting snails in the yard, a coach from school randomly wanders in – all drilled. Finally Valerie sneaks over to investigate, finds a machete in the basement and chops off the guy’s hand and his symbolically long and penetrative drill. At least it was better than Fascination, but this sent me off the Criterion Channel and back into my own collection.

Coach Speedo vs. Driller Killer:

by ·Comments Off on Fascination (1979, Jean Rollin)

Opens with a blood drinking ritual in a slaughterhouse, 1905.

Infighting in a gang of thieves, blonde guy takes a girl hostage to escape, she gets away immediately, he runs and discovers a manor draped in fog and ominous music. The thieves lurk outside, confident they can move in and take him and his stolen gold. Inside, the runaway finds two hot girls. He locks them in a room and they start making out and getting gratuitously naked – ah yes, this is from the director of Shiver of the Vampires. Even not knowing French I can tell the dialogue acting is dry and unconvincing, but the nudity is legit.

Thief (Jean-Marie Lemaire of the Anthony Hopkins Hitler movie) and blonde Brigitte Lahaie (Calvaire and Jesús Franco’s Faceless) and brunette Franca Maï (whose wiki includes among her career achievements “co-creator of a website”) take turns threatening each other. Brigitte breaks the standoff by calmly delivering the gold to the people outside, then grabs the scythe from the poster art and dispatches a bunch of murderous thieves.

New woman arrives – this is Fanny Magier of Jesús Franco’s Hitler movie Convoy of Girls, which also stars Marc who is apparently a Hitler movie regular – and speaks of satanic rituals, everyone being calm and cool. I put this movie on because it’s short, but I’m the kid who held his breath in The Jaunt right now, as they play hilarious 1900’s blindfolded party games. Finally Brigitte is shot and the others devour her blood – I saw this turn coming since it’s in Criterion’s vampire collection.

by ·Comments Off on Earwig (2021, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

House mostly bare, frozen teeth girl’s only toys are twists of paper

It’s 24 minutes before the first words are spoken: a phone call checking on girl and her teeth.

You must start preparing the girl to leave, in 13 days.
Caretaker Paul Hilton (Lady Macbeth) is to teach her how to behave outside.

Provoked by stranger at bar, he attacks Celeste with a bottle (Romola Garai: older Saoirse Ronan in Atonement). Laurence (Alex Lawther of The Last Duel) says he will take care of her. Movie follows the attacked barmaid as she recovers, Laurence invites her to live at his country house.

Guy comes and installs permanent glass teeth.

Caretaker embraces Celeste as she chews his face off.

Angelo Muredda in Cinema Scope:

Earwig resonates on much the same unusual frequency as Hadzihalilovic’s previous films Innocence and Evolution, which similarly engage the thematics of children on the way to maturity being dumped into strange institutional settings with cryptic rules seemingly designed to feed upon their bodies and souls. Viewed in this context, Earwig can easily be read as the payoff to an imagistic science-fiction triptych about the low-key horrors of parenting and being parented, and the ways in which assorted care homes and finishing schools maim the very children they try to shape.